VeryWellAged: Blog

Fun with numbers

October 3, 2013

Posted at 10:34 pm

This site produces a series of numbers for the authors who have posted stories. I have some qualms about one of them, but there is a metric that can be gleaned from them, that is not part of the data displayed. We are told the number of downloads per story. We are told the number of readers who have placed a story in his or hers library. Reviewing the numbers I noticed what looked odd to me. So I built a chart for the undisclosed metric. For each story, how many readers are there, for one reader to put the story in a library?

What I found was the story that was least downloaded was the one that was most often held in a library once read. None of the most downloaded made the top four in this metric. Of course an argument can be made that the numbers would go down on these if more readers were exposed to these little read stories. That might be true. But I suspect not as my own assessment of the strengths of these stories is somewhat, but not totally, in alignment with the results of the metric.

In the case of The Food Court, there were problems with the original version that were fixed later, but many read the original and never saw the version now posted.

I posted "Retirement" as a serial and the first couple of chapters turned off some folks who might have changed their minds about the story if they har read it as a completed piece. Indeed I got a bunch of negative emails about the first posting than stopped entirely once more was online.